


Who You Are and Who You Left Behind

by GoldenPaca



Category: Hermitcraft RPF
Genre: Angst, Curse of Obedience, Hurt No Comfort, Kinda, M/M, Magic, Memory Loss, Nostalgia, Pining, Separations, impulse has something similar to a curse of obedience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:28:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29878404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenPaca/pseuds/GoldenPaca
Summary: Impulse is forgetting something, he knows he is. He feels incomplete because of what he's forgotten, and yet he still can't remember a thing.So someone ends up remembering everything for him, someone he can't recall.
Relationships: ImpulseSV/Skizzleman
Comments: 3
Kudos: 29





	Who You Are and Who You Left Behind

There’s something that’s missing in his life, Impulse knows that. He knows it like he knows the lines on his palm, like he knows the face he wakes up to in the mirror, like he knows the magic running through his veins. It’s knowledge of an intimate nature, to know you are missing a part of yourself that cannot be replaced, that needs to be found. And yet, he cannot find it. No matter the prowess he has in tearing down monuments for fun, or his somehow niche ability to take on the biggest of projects without breaking a sweat, he cannot find the piece of himself that is missing. He cannot find that part of himself that his whole being aches for, that his heart cries out to each time he cries out to sleep.

He knows that being who he is is both a blessing and a curse. Blessed with the ability to help any who needed it, blessed to be given the physical capabilities needed to carry out any task, but cursed to be liable to losing himself in his service, cursed to have to forgo himself in order to protect. He is a man bound to his friends, but it didn’t matter who he helps. At the end of it all he’s still tethered to them by a chain that runs as deep as his bloodline and he knows he cannot sever it, even if it hurts him to be incomplete.

Tango didn’t know what he was getting into when he summoned Impulse. Impulse didn’t really know what he was getting into when he taught the man how to summon him in the first place. He thought it would be a one-off thing, didn’t think that such a burden would end up becoming so heavy, but when Tango summoned him to help the hermits in the broadest sense of the phrase he could tell this was not something that would be easy. The magic that sung in the air as the contract was made did not seem to care for what Tango intended when he asked for help. Instead, all it followed was the law of the universe, a cruel universe at that, and bound Impulse to the server itself, so he may help all those that resided in its borders.

And so he is trapped, and as friends came and left, he had to stay. He could take breaks if he wanted to, he knows that, but a break cannot mean him leaving the server, nor did it mean he could deny anyone’s request for help should they approach him with one. Everyone wonders how he could have so much time to do the projects he does; after all, it’s no mean feat to dig down a hole all the way to bedrock the size of the one that lies beneath the main annex of his base. They didn’t know he lacked the ability to visit others outside of their server: friends, families, possible lovers. 

He’s sure he had someone waiting out there for him, someone he yearns to visit, to hug and hold as though they are something precious but for the life of him, Impulse cannot remember who they are. When he is created to serve and only to serve, the memories outside of his service begin to blend together. He remembers something about another server, smaller, but the only thing he can recall from that era of his life are the two people he considers himself to be closest to on Hermitcraft. Tango and Zedaph’s faces are clear to him in his memories, and yet he knows there was a fourth to their little group. A female, at that, but he cannot describe their face, nor does a name come to mind when thinking about her. 

But she’s not the one his heart sings for, aches for. There’s someone else, someone he tears his hair out at night thinking about. If they are so important to Impulse, if they are the missing part that he’s been searching for, then how come he cannot remember who they are. How come he cannot see a face in his dreams as vividly as he dreams of the other hermits, nor can he recall what name that person answered to. He knows there’s a name that’s etched into his heart but that engraving has been washed over until his mind can no longer remember it.

A being like him is not a being who is meant to have an identity of his own beyond service and he should just be grateful that the people he serves now are kind enough to give him the ability to carve out an identity for himself. It’s not something others with the same magic as him are rewarded. Except, his identity is now limited to who he is within the server. Outside it, he doesn’t know who he is.

It’s enough for him, on some days. On the days when he is out and about with his friends, making secret bases with Grian, and Bdubs, and Scar, or on the days when he, Tango, and Zedaph get up to some controlled shenanigans of his own, then he doesn’t mind being bound to serve them. In fact, he even finds it a gift, that he gets to aid them as they create sprawling skylines and buzzing farms.

But on other days, when he is usually left alone to his own devices, when someone announces they’ll be taking a break to spend some time off the server, when he is reminded he is nobody if not for the need to serve that course through his body, he knows his identity is not enough. Because all he has is just a fragment of knowledge of who he really is, all he holds with him are memories that only make up a small percentage of who he should be. He’s not complete, he knows he isn’t, and he loathes the fact that he isn’t. He loathes the fact that he can never be complete because he can’t remember the damned part of him that would complete him.

He wants to remember. If there is one thing he can ask for, then it’s to remember who he is, who he can be, and who it is he was missing. He knows he is missing someone, but he doesn’t know how he can miss something that he doesn’t even know. How can he miss something his mind has swept aside and deemed useless? How can he miss himself if who he is is still unclear? How can he miss someone he doesn’t know the face of, the name of, the sound of their voice? What is there to miss? What is there to yearn for? Should he be yearning at all? Or was his feelings, his energy, his time wasted on something that would yield as much fruit as waiting for an apple tree to sprout oranges?

He’s losing himself, little by little, and it’s all starting with losing that one person who should complete him, that one person he thinks could have grounded him, like they probably did in the past. He’s forgetting who they are, who he is, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

What he doesn’t know is that millions and billions of blocks away, separated by time, space, and the Void, is a smaller, humble server that contains someone who does remember who he is, or at least who he means to them. Amidst the wreckage of a world brought back from an apocalypse is someone who, like him, was summoned to help the members of this server out. He is someone who stays despite not being bound because he has nowhere else to go.

Skizzleman left behind his old life but he does not forget. He can’t forget the emptiness of the floating island he once called home, devoid of life when it was only him there left. He can’t forget the sinking feeling in his gut that grew the more time he spent peering down the edge of their small world, looking down into the Void as though it might make the nights he spent less lonelier. And he surely can’t forget the person he’s missing, the person that once upon a time kept those lonely feelings at bay, the person who disappeared so suddenly and never came back.

It happened so quickly that he didn’t understand that something even happened until it became all too clear he was alone on the island. Impulse had gone out to an adjacent island to get something. Skizz can’t remember anymore what it is, can only remember cooking food for the two of them that night, making just the right amount for two people but only eating one portion until the other went cold, until the other went bad. He remembers something about messaging Impulse, asking where he is, and not getting a response. He remembers chalking it up to his inability to stop working when he got into the mood, not thinking much of it until three meals passed with half of what he cooked going to waste, until he went to bed with one side untouched like before.

The next day he went searching, flying around until his wings nearly broke and sent him plummeting, and walking across their many mini-islands until he’d scoured all possible land. He didn’t see a single trace of Impulse, nor one thing to say that he’d been to the island he said he was going to in the first place. He just vanished, and suddenly Skizz was scrambling to hang on to any last bit he had of him.

A shirt that was tattered from all their sparring sessions, a pair of boots that gleamed but were never used because Impulse wanted to reserve them for emergencies, and a pair of tattered wings that Impulse said he would repair but never got the chance to. Skizz didn’t repair it for him, adamantly refused to. Deep down, he knew that if he were to repair it, then it was sort of like accepting Impulse was not coming back, that he wouldn’t be able to repair it himself. He refused to believe that, not for a moment, even when the nights were longer and sleepless, even if the days were too hot for him to do anything except think about where he can be. He refused to see the fact that his best friend, his partner, his other half, was gone.

But he couldn’t escape the truth of his loneliness, no matter how hard he tried. Everywhere he went he was reminded of the fact that the world he was in was made by two pairs of hands, not one. Everywhere he looked he saw reminders that he shouldn’t be alone on their island, that someone should have been with him but wasn’t. And as much as he wanted to hold onto the hope that Impulse would return, he couldn’t keep holding on to the idea that their island was still his home because it really was no longer his home. It ceased to be his home the moment he realized Impulse was gone.

So when he received the invitation to join the legates, when he found the opportunity to surround himself with people again, people who didn’t remind him of the person he was missing, he took that chance. But he can’t say he did it without looking back. No, he does look back, more times than he thinks is healthy. It’s one of the things he keeps doing in the world he stays in now; he walks in the desert, the sand cool beneath his boots (diamond boots, he refuses to make them netherite. They’ll always be diamond boots, like his pair was) as he keeps his head towards the sky. He prays, he pleads, he cries, knowing that the twinge in his heart means nothing’s coming out of his pointless actions. Not that night. Maybe not ever, but he refuses to entertain that possibility.

When nothing comes out of those nights, he still keeps them close to his heart, for it is in those nights that he remembers. He remembers Impulse’s fond smile, his heart laughter, the way his eyes gleamed when a well-thought out plan is executed perfectly. He remembers the way his eyebrows would twitch when thinking, how his hands, ever those of a drummer, would tap beats into any available surface when he needed a sound to distract himself. He remembers the shape of his hips, the way his hands fit perfectly around him as his head finds itself perched near his shoulder and they dance to the quiet sound of the jukebox playing nearby. He remembers the way his chest heaves when taking a deep breath, the way his fingers would wrap itself tightly around his as though afraid to let go, as though afraid he’ll be ripped away the moment he does. And he remembers the way his name sounds when said by those lips, how he can somehow make a single word be charged with so much emotion and affection that he had no choice but to close the gap, close the distance and pull him in close until he could memorize the way his lips moved when he called out for him.

And it hurts him to remember. It hurts that he’s stuck with memories of a person he cannot find, a person he cannot call out for. He doesn’t know if Impulse is still alive, if his dippledop is even still around to answer to that nickname. It hurts him to remember but it hurts to think even more of a time that he’ll forget, of a time that he cannot remember all those details about his missing piece. His heart clenches around the emptiness in his chest at the idea of ever forgetting him, and so no matter how easy it would be to immerse himself in his surroundings, to find companionship in the many people surrounding him, he can’t find himself able to do that. Not at all.

He’s stuck remembering a fragment of himself that he can never let go, because he knows remembering is all he can do, because he doesn’t know that remembering is the one thing his other half wishes to be able to do but can’t. Impulse is bound to serve and to remember only those he serves on Hermitcraft. And Skizz? Skizz is bound to love Impulse, and to remember him when he cannot remember who it was he left behind.

**Author's Note:**

> Is there a happy ending to this? Perhaps there might be, perhaps there won't. What we're sure of is that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but only when it remembers what is gone.


End file.
